Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Review: Emmy & Oliver by Robin Benway

Emmy’s best
friend, Oliver, reappears after being kidnapped by his father ten years
ago. Emmy hopes to pick up their relationship right where it left off.
Are they destined to be together? Or has fate irreparably driven them
apart?

Emmy just wants to be in charge of her own life.

She
wants to stay out late, surf her favorite beach—go anywhere without her
parents’ relentless worrying. But Emmy’s parents can’t seem to let her
grow up—not since the day Oliver disappeared.

Oliver needs a moment to figure out his heart.

He’d
thought, all these years, that his dad was the good guy. He never knew
that it was his father who kidnapped him and kept him on the run.
Discovering it, and finding himself returned to his old hometown, all at
once, has his heart racing and his thoughts swirling.

Emmy and
Oliver were going to be best friends forever, or maybe even more, before
their futures were ripped apart. In Emmy’s soul, despite the space and
time between them, their connection has never been severed. But is their
story still written in the stars? Or are their hearts like the pieces
of two different puzzles—impossible to fit together?

Readers who
love Sarah Dessen will tear through these pages with hearts in throats
as Emmy and Oliver struggle to face the messy, confusing consequences of
Oliver’s father’s crime. Full of romance, coming-of-age emotion, and
heartache, these two equally compelling characters create an
unforgettable story.

My Thoughts:

Having read a
couple of Robin Benway novels before and quite enjoying them, I was
enthusiastic about the prospect of reading Emmy & Oliver.
Unfortunately, the reading experience did not end up being quite what
I expected. This is my attempt to explain why.

Emmy and Oliver
have known each other since the day they were born. Growing up, Emmy
had always realied on the fact that Oliver was there for her, and
vice versa. When Oliver suddenly disappeared, everything changed.
Emmy lost her best friend and her confidante, as well as any
remeblance of freedom, which became a problem the older she got. Her
parents, shaken by Oliver's destiny, have since his disappearance
kept her tightly close to home, just to make sure that nothing
similar happens to her.

Ten years since
seeing Oliver the last time, Emmy is given a new chance when Oliver
comes back home. Confused by what has happened to him and the way he
is supposed to feel about his father and what he did, Oliver is not
the same little boy anymore. He has grown up, whereas to Emmy it
feels like not much has changed in the past ten years; her parents
are still in control, still treating her like Oliver had just
disappeared.

Connecting with
Oliver does not come easily, but when it happens, Emmy feels like she
has gotten her best friend back. What remains for her to do is to
show to her parents that she has grown up, that Oliver is safe now
and that it is time for them to loosen their grip and let Emmy make
her own decisions.

The main thing
that bugged me about this book is the way that it discusses parents,
almost like they are just this caricature of overbearing paranoids.
Emmy clearly loves her parents, but at the same time she talks about
them like she has nothing in common with them, which in my opinion,
is not true at all (I definitely was able to notice features of both
her father and mother in her). For most of the book, her parents just
seem like this “evil” entitity that do not let her to do what she
wants, where in fact they just care about her. I feel like Benway
intents the reader to identify with Emmy and her struggles, but I
continually felt like I wanted to side with the parents and hoped for
better representation of them – a representation that does not rely
so heavily on the stereotypical “my mother is a ballbuster” trope
and would have shown them more as individuals, not just caricatures
of causes for teenage angst. I get the whole “my parents don't get
me” argument – I think everyone who has been a teenager gets that
– but in my opinion, it was taken way too far with this one. Or
maybe I just miss my mother so much now that I am not a teenager
anymore and she does not daily tell me what to do, that I just did
not understand why Emmy complains all the time.

The premise of
getting someone important back to your life after a long time of
confusion sounded interesting to me, but unfortunately much of the
discovery that could have been done on this topic was overshadowed by
the whole teenagers-parents conflict. While reading, I love the
feeling I get when I feel like I know the characters and can in some
level identify with them, or at least understand their actions.
Unfortunately, with Emmy & Oliver, I felt like I did not really
connect with any of the characters and as I kept reading, I started
to feel like I did not even want to connect with them. Oliver
definitely is the most sympathetic of the characters in this novel,
but I hope that Benway would have taken more time to his thoughts and
his feelings. But since the novel is from the point of view of Emmy,
we only get to experience Oliver's struggles through her eyes and
unfortunately Emmy's point of view is most of the time clouded by her
own problems and struggles.

To be completely
honest, at around 60 % into this book, I almost gave up. I just did
not see myself finishing this one and started to think about the next
book I would read. But since I had accepted this book for review, I
felt like it was my possibility to finish with the book before making
any sort of judgements about it. Yes, now that I am writing this,
there is a part of me that wishes that I would just have given up and
spent the time reading something else, but on the other hand, now I
can at least justifiably express why I did not like this book in a
form of this review.